Page 158 of Autumn Queens & Shadows

It had been a lie.

They all had tried, but they’d found nothing.

The last attempt at it sat on Visha’s worktable, dead. The girl had been young. Barely sixteen when she had joined my father’s war and then forcibly turned. The dark magic had corroded firstly though her own blessing, rendering her without it and without the life sustenance it offered, and then it had gone to spread over her organs, one after the other. Because the magic was part otherworldly, there was very little one could use against it besides soothing its symptoms once it had gotten beyond the point of containment.

“Kid,” Alaric sighed. “You’ve tried.”

I could feel my heart drop and drop. “Not hard enough. My magic can heal the land, it surely can heal this, too.”

“By breaking every law of nature there is,” Visha agreed. “But we are not dealing with anything natural, Your Majesty. The only thing their disease will do is fight your magic, not fight itself like the land did. And the more it will absorb from it, the more the disease will feed and grow. Only to quicken the steps to death. Best we can do at this sort of stage is letting it slowly take its course. It’s the least painful thing to do.”

Skadi stood silent and still by a large window, looking at Taren city. She loved Taren. Taren had loved her back, too. The air in Olympia had always soothed her in nights where she’d retched her stomach almost to death or when her lungs had wished to seize breathing. The air, the nature and the people of Olympia had been more a cure than any potion she’d had. She often remained here. She would have done it more often, but she also liked being close to me. It soothed another aching part of her soul—that is what she had told me. A part of her soul that had ached long before she’d been a beast or a monster. Back when she’d just wanted to be a mother.

Skadi coughed and I pushed my chair back to hand her a handkerchief.

She turned to me at that moment. A trail of blood chasing down her eyes that looked like they’d accepted a long and tiring defeat. “This was all I could bear,” she said. More blood poured down her pale face. “I hope you find it in yourself to forgive me someday. I hope you do, daughter.”

One moment she was standing there, at the edge of the open window.

The next she was gone.

Right before my eyes.

My feet had stuck to the ground as everyone else rushed past me to the window, screaming and calling for her.

I couldn’t move.

It had been too late even if I did move.

Chapter thirty-seven

Red Foxgloves

Thora

Reaching to the headstone, I trailed a finger over the letters, tracing her name.

Gone.

She was gone.

All this time, she was never here.

Mal pulled me to his lap. “Rora.”

The ache corroded at my chest. “Take it away. Take this one away, please.”

His lips pressed to my temple. “I’m trying,” he murmured, his whole body shaking. “I’m really trying. But it’s not working, and I think I might have to use magic this time. I think I might have to use it this time, Rora, I don’t know what else to do.”

The whole world went quiet.

Even my ears stopped ringing.

There was no numbness, only heaviness weighting my mind and body, holding me earthbound as if they knew I desperately wanted to be elsewhere. “What?”

He didn’t let me go even when I tried to push him back. Mal kept rocking us back and forth.

“Mal?”